Social Media Use, Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), Sleep Disturbance, and Physical Health Complaints: A Social Media...

Research on social media use, fear of missing out (FoMO), sleep disturbance, and health complaints has been dominated by survey-based studies, particularly among adolescents and university students. Less is known about how users spontaneously describe these experiences in naturalistic online settings. This exploratory pilot study examined how publicly available Reddit discussions narrate the relationship between social media use, FoMO-related concern, sleep disruption, and self-reported physical complaints.

A total of 30 publicly available English-language Reddit posts and comments were purposively sampled from 11 threads dated August 2022 to March 2026. The study used exploratory qualitative content analysis supported by reflexive thematic interpretation. Structured indicators were used to describe whether each unit contained explicit FoMO language, implicit FoMO-related concern, sleep disturbance, physical health complaints, and nighttime use or sleep loss. Thematic coding was used to identify dominant discourse patterns. All counts and percentages are reported only to characterize the analytic corpus and should not be interpreted as prevalence estimates.

Within the corpus, sleep disturbance appeared in 16 of 30 units, nighttime use or sleep loss in 15, physical health complaints in 11, explicit FoMO language in 6, and implicit FoMO-related concern in 3. The dominant themes were delayed sleep and bedtime displacement, somatic and cognitive overload, self-regulation and recovery, and compulsive monitoring and comparison. Sleep-related complaints were usually described alongside bedtime scrolling, delayed disengagement, or lost sleep opportunity. FoMO-related concern was less often expressed through formal terminology and more often appeared through everyday descriptions of checking, comparison, and difficulty disconnecting.

This small exploratory corpus suggests that Reddit users often describe social media-related strain through practical behavioral language, such as late-night scrolling, inability to stop, lost sleep, next-day fatigue, headache, and brain fog. The findings are descriptive, discourse-focused, and hypothesis-generating. They do not estimate population prevalence or establish causal health effects. To improve transparency, the revised study provides a de-identified analytic matrix of all 30 coded Reddit units and reports a strengthened coding procedure with independent second-coder checking. Naturally occurring online discourse may complement survey-based digital-health research by showing how users themselves frame the embodied experience of digital over-engagement.